Yes, this resonates with me. I thought the article lumped together multiple different types of understanding, and attacked an "understanding first" approach by

Yes, this resonates with me. I thought the article lumped together multiple different types of understanding, and attacked an "understanding first" approach by using a very limited definition. From the specific examples in the article, you can see that practice is useful to gaining a systemic understanding. But there's a bit of a claim that repetition leads to useful understanding, which is simplistic. Juggling the terms of F=ma is not what I would call repetition. It is practice, certainly, but to me repetition pretty strongly implies the absence of tweaking things according to the understanding you have so far. And that, I would assert, is a very slow and ineffective way of building up knowledge and deep understanding. (It will works, but only because our brains will get bored and sense patterns and start inferring some level of understanding no matter what. Although I'd gamble that a disinterested student who only needs to make it through all 50 problems on a worksheet will be pretty successful in avoiding any learning.)